Starting a Life Together With Pi

When Robert Burton Jr. proposed to Jaclyn Sawler, he had a wedding date in mind: March 14. He had a time in mind, too: 9:26 a.m. He had his reasons.

Ms. Sawler, 27, and Mr. Burton, 30, met eight years ago at a friend’s birthday party in Kearny, N.J. Ms. Sawler, who teaches pre-K and kindergarten classes at the Hamilton Park Montessori School in Jersey City, attended with someone who knew Mr. Burton and who also knew that he was an expert at speed-cubing, or unscrambling a Rubik’s Cube in less time than it takes to explain what a Rubik’s Cube is. Namely, a cube-shaped plastic puzzle that was popular in the 1980s and now has tremendous appeal among math and science types like Mr. Burton, a math teacher at Explorations Academy, a high school in the Bronx.

Mr. Burton, who averages an 18-second solve, demonstrated his skill for her at the party, but remembered little of the encounter later. “I had to be retold that part of the story” by other friends who were there, he said, because he had had a lot to drink that night.

Once his memory had been filled in, he looked her up on Facebook and sent her a message. They went on their first date about a month after the party to see “Pulse,” a horror film, and, before the evening ended, to meet his family. She said he also tried to unscramble a cube while blindfolded. “He was unsuccessful,” she said.

Soon, he had taught her how to unscramble a cube, and she, too, was entering competitions. Her best time is 28 seconds. (By contrast, Douglas R. Hofstadter, the Indiana University professor who wrote the best seller “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” once acknowledged that he needed “50 hours of work, distributed over several months” to solve the “unscrambling problem.”)

She was just starting college and he was just finishing his undergraduate work, she at Montclair State, he at Rutgers. They lived with their parents as they received their bachelor’s degrees and enrolled in graduate schools, New Jersey City University for her, the City University of New York for him.

After several years of dating, Mr. Burton began saving money for a house for them, Ms. Sawler said. In 2012 they found one in Kearny. He spent the next year fixing it up and moved in, but she continued to live with her parents, four blocks away.

By last June, though, she found that she was spending all her time at the house with him. “I just stopped going home,” she said. “As soon as I did that, we knew.”

But Mr. Burton said he would not propose until she completed his favorite Nintendo action-adventure video game, “Legend of Zelda.” He changed his mind on the day after Valentine’s Day because she was stuck on Level 8 and he wanted the ceremony to be March 14.

That day is celebrated among math aficionados as Pi Day in recognition of the first few digits of the number representing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, 3.1415.

He explained his wedding-date calculus this way: The 3 before the decimal point in pi would stand for March; the 14 after the decimal point would stand for the day; and the 15 for the year. Oh, and the Pi Day in 2015 was the one Pi Day in 100 years when that sequence would apply.

“It made Bob happy, so I was O.K. with that,” she said.

When Ms. Sawler told relatives that she and Mr. Burton had decided on that date, she discovered a potential scheduling conflict for some guests: A cousin had already scheduled her wedding for that afternoon because of the date’s significance. “She was marrying a physics major,” Ms. Sawler said. “It’s the men we love.”

Ms. Sawler figured that she and Mr. Burton could simply choose a different date, but he had a different idea, one that had occurred to him during their discussions about their wedding day but that he had not mentioned.

He said that the next few digits of pi, an irrational number in which two digits never repeat in succession, could stand for the time. The digit after the 5 is a 9. Therefore, as a mathematician concluding an important proof might say, what about a morning wedding?

From left, Mr. Burton; his best man, Jayce Burton; and a friend, John Melendez. The groom is also a competitive unscrambler of the Rubik’s Cube.CreditDanny Kim for The New York Times

Nor did he stop with the hour and the minute. He was aware that when carried to 9 decimal places, pi was 3.141592653. He said that the right time for the ceremony was the 53rd second of the 26th minute of the ninth hour of the day. She agreed.

Then they turned to finding a suitable place for the ceremony. “Originally, we were just planning something low-key,” Mr. Burton said. “We were trying to find somewhere that would let us have a space at that time of the morning. We checked a couple of restaurants, but most restaurants are closed at 9 in the morning.”

They tried the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, a place that brought back memories: The center had been the setting for a reception several years ago that honored Erno Rubik, the Hungarian architecture professor who invented the cube.

Mr. Burton and Ms. Sawler were invited and took part in an unscrambling demonstration. Mr. Rubik “was front and center in the audience as we did a race on the stage,” she recalled, and he even borrowed one of her cubes. “He was trying to solve it himself,” she said.

Still, Ms. Sawler initially resisted asking about scheduling the wedding at the science center. “I thought that sounded crazy, that it sounded like his perfect wedding and had nothing to do with me,” she said.

But she relented because there was less than a month for planning. “I was glad because she didn’t have time to turn into a Bridezilla,” he said. “I figured if this had dragged on for months, she would have had too much to stress about all kinds of little things I didn’t care about.”

Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive of the science center, offered to officiate and became a Universal Life minister for the occasion. He told the guests it was “a big Greek wedding, because of pi, and a big geek wedding.”

Mr. Hoffman set up a countdown clock, a giant screen that showed the time — and froze at 9:26:53, his cue to start the wedding.

He said he and the couple had decided to start then after considering other possibilities. “I was afraid it would be too hard to coordinate the kiss or the ‘I do’ or the ‘You’re married’ at that moment,” Mr. Hoffman said, “and we needed to make sure it was exact because I won’t be alive to get it right in the next century.”

Unlike a 4 o’clock wedding, a 9:26 wedding struck some of the guests as punishingly early. Mr. Burton’s father, Robert Burton Sr., said, “My brain is not awake yet.” The best man (and brother of the groom), Jayce Burton, said he was not thrilled with a wedding at such an unconventional time.

The groom, worried that Jayce would miss the moment, dialed his cellphone number at 9:03 because he had not seen him. “He says, ‘Man, I just woke up,’ ” Robert Burton Jr. said, “but he was messing with me. He was in the parking lot.”

Inside the science center, Mr. Burton was putting on a tuxedo and the shoes he had bought for the occasion. “I had told her I wanted to be comfortable,” Mr. Burton said. “She agreed to let me wear sneakers as long as they were brand-new and all black.” Ms. Sawler wore a sweetheart-top dress that she ordered online from Ann Taylor. “It fit perfectly,” she said.

The 15 guests took seats in an exhibition space that opened last year for the 40th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube. It features an 18-karat gold cube said to be worth $2.5 million, and a cube-solving robot. For the reception that followed the ceremony, tables were set up that were decorated with Rubik’s Cube party favors that said “Bob + Jaclyn = Just married.”

In his sermon, Mr. Hoffman talked about the significance of pi, and the significance of marriage.

“At first blush, what could be simpler than the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter?” Mr. Hoffman said. “But pi is not a simple fraction. It’s not like 3¾ or 3½. It’s a decimal that never repeats. It’s an irrational number. One could look at love as being irrational. Love is simple, too, until you start probing why it works.”

The couple kissed as the ceremony ended. Then, standing in front of the pi symbol, they solved their first competitive cube as a married couple.

“Of course, I won,” she said. “That’s the rules of marriage now.”

ON THIS DAY

When March 14, 2015.

Where Liberty Science Center, Jersey City.

Details For the ceremony, chairs were arranged in a gallery housing a $5 million exhibition about Rubik’s Cubes. It features a Rubik’s Cube said to be worth $2.5 million that pivots and swivels like an ordinary plastic one, but the colored faces are made of rubies, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. A few steps away is a cube-solving robot that struggles against speed cubers like the bride and groom, who mastered the twists and turns of a Rubik’s Cube years ago.

Cake, No Pies The temptation, on Pi Day, was to serve pie to the guests at the reception that followed the ceremony. Ms. Sawler said Mr. Burton “was all for it” and the science center offered to provide one, but she vetoed it, opting for a vanilla-­and-chocolate mousse cake. “I do not like pies,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST14 of the New York edition with the headline: Starting a Life Together With Pi. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe